Rice Questioners May Avoid Partisanship

By PHILIP SHENON

Published: April 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 7—
The leaders of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks urged the panel's members on Wednesday to try to avoid partisanship in their public questioning of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, whose long-awaited sworn testimony could alter the public's view of her, the Bush administration and the commission itself, panel officials said.

They said that at a final strategy session before the hearing on Thursday, the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, asked the other eight members of the panel to try to avoid questions that suggested partisanship and that could undermine the public perceptions of the commission's work.

Both men have said they are concerned about the appearance of a partisan split created at last month's testimony by Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism director, who was harshly questioned by Republicans on the panel after he said that the Bush administration -- and Ms. Rice, in particular -- had largely ignored terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001.

''In a very difficult atmosphere, in a town that is the most polarized I've ever seen, the commission is trying to do a job for the American people that is, to the best of our ability, nonpolitical,'' Mr. Kean said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In a statement after its meeting on Wednesday, the panel also disclosed that it had identified 69 documents from the Clinton White House that needed to be turned over the commission by the Bush administration, which acknowledged last week that it had not turned over 10,800 pages of Clinton administration files gathered by the National Archives.

The panel said that a team of staff members reviewed all of the files this week and found that more than 90 percent of the material ''had already been produced, was irrelevant to our our work or was duplicative.'' In a statement, the commission said that it had identified 12 other Clinton White House documents that ''we consider clearly or arguably responsive to our requests'' and that should have been turned over previously.

''The White House has now produced these documents to the commission,'' the statement said, offering no other description of the Clinton files. ''The review team concludes that any errors in document production were inadvertent.''

The statement said that an additional 57 documents did not fall into categories of documents that the panel had previously questioned from the White House but that ''nonetheless are relevant to our work'' and should be turned over. ''The commission has asked for production of these documents,'' the statement said. The panel said that it was ''making a parallel request for Bush administration documents.''

The White House acknowledged last week that it had failed to turn over the files after public complaints from aides to the former president who said they feared that the panel would make judgments about the Clinton White House without full access to its records.

While the statement described the process of gathering documents from the White House as ''constructive,'' one Democratic member of the panel said in an interview that he was concerned that the White House was continuing to try to hide information from the commission.

''We have had trouble getting documents from the White House from the very beginning,'' said the Democrat, Timothy J. Roemer, another former House member from Indiana. ''It continues to be like extracting teeth. We've got these 12 Clinton documents, but we've 57 to go, and we want any parallel documents from the Bush administration.''

The White House would not comment on Wednesday on Ms. Rice's preparations for her two-and-a-half hour appearance on Thursday, which is expected to be televised live by major television networks, another demonstration of the importance that is being attached to her testimony.

Administration officials have said that Ms. Rice will not join Mr. Clarke in apologizing to the families of Sept. 11 victims but will instead say that the Bush administration was on top of terrorism issues from its first days in power and that Mr. Clarke is wrong in asserting that she and the president failed to understand the danger.

Panel members said that during the meeting on Wednesday the commission settled on their procedures for questioning Ms. Rice, with Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton as the leading questioners at the start of the hearing, followed by a round of questions by each of the other commissioners.

That would suggest a gentler tone in the initial questioning of Ms. Rice than was seen with Mr. Clarke and other Clinton and Bush administration witnesses who were subjected to harsh questioning virtually from the start of their hearings. Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton, who are considered moderate in both their politics and their temperaments, have asked few questions in recent public hearings.

Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the panel and former senator from Nebraska, said in an interview after the meeting that Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton had told the panel's members that ''we've got a tough job tomorrow -- tougher than Dr. Rice's job, because we have to ask tough questions that don't appear to be partisan.''

Mr. Kerrey said that the commission's leaders appeared to be concerned that Ms. Rice would be seen as being treated with unfair harshness by the panel.